


Valediction

by tastewithouttalent



Category: K (Anime)
Genre: Alcohol, Canonical Character Death, Conversations, Flashbacks, Heavy Angst, Language of Flowers, M/M, No Plot/Plotless, Overworking, Past Character Death, Past Relationship(s), Smoking, hanahaki
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-28
Updated: 2017-09-28
Packaged: 2018-12-31 10:23:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,006
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12130398
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tastewithouttalent/pseuds/tastewithouttalent
Summary: "The best Reisi can manage is an easing, a relief as desperately needed as it is temporary, and on those rare occasions he has the chance to indulge in such there is only one place he ever goes." Reisi carries a burden behind the press of his lips.





	Valediction

Reisi can feel the ache in the back of his throat.

It sits there all the time, while he’s at his own headquarters or when he’s visiting Homra’s. It lingers through his evenings and it greets him with the first moment of opening his eyes, catching and pulling at his breathing before he’s even put his glasses on. He carries it like a weight, a burden trapped inside the space of his chest even as he tips his shoulders back, and straightens his spine, and performs the role of the King he has assumed for the benefit of those who follow him. There’s no space for weakness, no room for surrender even to something so everpresent; so he presses his lips together, and he breathes past the strain, and for all the long hours that he spends at Scepter 4 he holds back the catch of his breathing the same way he holds back the burn behind his eyes and the strain in his chest, the pressure of grief that drags at the inside of his ribs like it’s trying to crush him where he stands.

He doesn’t try to free himself from it. It’s useless, a futile effort more a waste of his too-valuable time than anything else; there will be no breaking free of this cage any more than there was of pulling aside from the inevitable conclusion Mikoto set them both towards by the necessity of his actions. The best Reisi can manage is an easing, a relief as desperately needed as it is temporary, and on those rare occasions he has the chance to indulge in such there is only one place he ever goes.

“It’s late,” Izumo says now, his back turned to Reisi as he lifts a bottle in one hand to pour dark liquid into the glass set on the counter before him. “You’re lucky I don’t have a date to get to tonight.”

“Awashima is reviewing information with Fushimi,” Reisi says without particular emotion on the words. “She’ll be occupied through the evening.”

Izumo glances back at that, looking like he might be thinking of further banter; but the start of the smile at his lips fades as he looks at Reisi’s face, the amusement in his expression melts as he considers the other. He turns back towards the counter and sets the bottle aside.

“You need to give yourself a break,” he says without turning around. There’s the clink of ice against the glass like punctuation for his statement. “You can’t be superhuman all the time.”

“This is a break,” Reisi says without any inflection at all. He keeps his gaze fixed on the bottle alongside Izumo’s elbow and swallows hard to force the pressure in his throat back into submission again. “I’m leaving my people on their own.”

“For a night,” Izumo says. “Under Awashima and Fushimi.” He picks up the glass from the counter and turns around, holding it out towards Reisi as he reaches for a napkin to slide under the counter beneath it. “It’s not a break when you plan it weeks in advance.”

“It’s time off,” Reisi says, keeping his eyes on the glass rather than meeting the steady force of Izumo’s gaze. There’s too much caring, there, for him to stand to see. He lifts the cup to his lips to sip against the heat of the liquid inside. “There’s no vacations from my position.”

Izumo’s laugh is soft, more gentle than Reisi expected to hear from him, more resignation than amused. “Sometimes you really do remind me of him.”

Reisi’s throat tenses, his lungs spasm. The alcohol on his tongue sticks and burns, flaring to too-much heat in the same motion he rocks forward to cough hard, once, before he can press his hand to his mouth and pin back whatever other reaction he might have had. His chest burns, he can feel the ache of the alcohol and the painful desire to cough warring for control over his body; and he shuts his eyes, and presses harder against his mouth, and wages a war with his emotions, with his reflexes, with everything in him that is so determined to drag him down into the humanity he can’t let himself feel. His throat spasms, his chest tightens; and he sets his jaw, and presses his lips together, and forces himself through one breath, and then another, slow so he can draw the air without wheezing. It’s an impossible challenge, every inhale is a war unto itself; but Reisi keeps pushing, and keeps winning, and finally the pressure slinks back into surrender, at least for the moment, lurking in the back of his mind where he can cage it to safety once more.

Izumo is watching him when Reisi lets his hand fall and opens his eyes again. There’s a crease at his forehead, a dip just between his eyebrows; his mouth is soft and pained, his whole expression reading of sympathy too clearly for the impulse to be misunderstood.

“Munakata,” he sighs, and his voice is as pained as his gaze, his tone so aching with shared hurt that Reisi can feel his throat strain again just for the hearing of it. “Even now?”

Reisi lets his gaze drop from Izumo’s steady attention to fix his focus on the liquid in his glass and the curl of red within it. “It’s hardly likely to have disappeared.”

Izumo’s sigh is heavy in the quiet of the bar. Reisi can see the glow of the setting sun in the color of the liquid in his cup. “It’s too much,” he says, as if Reisi doesn’t know, as if Reisi can’t feel the weight bearing down on his psyche to bring out all the cracks within it, to pick at all his fragilities like a river eroding away at the banks around it. “You can’t keep on like this.”

“I must,” Reisi says. There is no unhappiness on his voice. He has no room for unhappiness, no room for self-pity; it’s all he can do to breathe while he hears it in Izumo’s tone, all he can do to reflect back that sympathy instead of letting it soak into his weakened self and undo whatever strength he has yet held to. He blinks deliberately, feeling the motion at a distance, like he’s watching it flicker over someone else’s face. “There is no one else.”

“You’re doing exactly what he did,” Izumo says, and for a moment Reisi can’t breathe at all, as if his throat has seized tight around even that oblique reference, as if he’s somehow startled by the reference to the existence that has haunted him since well before the other’s death, as if Mikoto’s presence is made the more clear by someone else acknowledging it. “You’re taking on too much, Munakata, isn’t this exactly what you wanted to stop him from doing?”

“I wanted--” Reisi starts; and then he stops, choked on his own honesty, tongue-tied by the sincerity he can’t let himself give voice to. It doesn’t make a difference in any case; whether he says the words or not he knows they both hear them, they hover around him like the echo of that ghost that clings to his every breath and draws every inhale into a struggle. Reisi stares at the glass in front of him, watches the edges of it blur and haze as his vision goes liquid, as his focus dissolves; and then he shuts his eyes, and lifts his glasses free so he can press his fingers to the damp at the corners of his eyes, so he can curl his hand in and crush the tears away against his palm.

There’s a pause of silence. Reisi can feel the weight of his breathing drag loud in the quiet before Izumo inhales, and sighs, and leans heavily on the counter. “You can’t keep doing this to yourself, Munakata.”

Reisi sets his glasses back on, carefully, thinking through every detail of the action as they settle against the bridge of his nose before he lets his hand drop back to the edge of the counter, his fingers slack and relaxed with the illusion of a calm he doesn’t feel.

“No,” he says, agreement more a statement of fact than a capitulation. He pushes against the edge of the bar so he can get to his feet. “I have to keep going.”

Izumo ducks his head over the glass. “I can get you another,” he says, reaching out to draw the scarlet floating within the liquid in towards him. “On the house.”

Reisi lifts his chin. “No,” he says. “I should be going anyway.”

Izumo’s hand tightens against the glass, his fingers bracing as he tilts it sideways to let the flower within float and bump against the sphere of ice still chilling the undrunk alcohol. “Cyclamen?”

Reisi doesn’t blink, doesn’t look away. “It’s always been.”

Izumo looks up over the top of his sunglasses. His eyes are sad, his mouth is soft; but he just meets Reisi’s gaze for a moment before he ducks his head into surrender to whatever he sees in the other’s face. “I suppose it would be.”

Reisi lifts his hands to the lapels of his jacket and pulls the weight of the coat closer around his shoulders, as if the heavy fall of it is likely to warm him when he feels like all the fire has left his life. “Goodnight.”

“Goodnight,” Izumo says; but Reisi is turning away without waiting, stepping forward to free himself from the space that belongs to Homra, the space that still belongs to  _him_. His throat is burning as he steps out onto the sidewalk, his eyes are hot; even when he turns his head up towards the encroaching dark of the sky overhead the pressure doesn’t ease, the knot in his chest doesn’t unravel.

_“Beautiful flowers,” Reisi had said, his tone light as it never is now, as he never shows to anyone since-- “Red cyclamen, aren’t they?”_

_Mikoto’s laugh was deep, rumbling in the depths of his chest like it was tasting the cigarette smoke that clung to his lips, that wound around Reisi’s hair in the absence of his usual glasses. “Didn’t figure you to have an eye for flowers.” When he had rolled over the sheets under them had shifted, pulled taut around Reisi’s hips like they were trying to draw them closer together. “Not very orderly, are they?”_

_“There’s a difference between work and pleasure,” Reisi had told him. When he reached out to touch the soft of the flower petal his arm had bumped Mikoto’s shoulder, his skin drawing warmth free of the other’s body and into his own. “I happen to be quite interested in floriography, personally.”_

_“Really,” Mikoto had purred, his mouth curving onto the start of the rakish grin he was always so quick to offer for Reisi’s consideration. “What do these mean, then?”_

The wind catches at Reisi’s hair, pulling against the fall of it like fingers ruffling through the strands, like the air itself is trying to gain traction on him. He takes a breath and feels it clinging and sticking against the pressure in his chest, the pain of the unrequited love that spills from his lips whenever he’s careless enough to take a full breath, to relax into the instinctive ease of natural inhales.

“Resignation,” he says aloud, murmuring the words to the wind curling around him, wandering under the lapels of his jacket and tucking itself in against the back of his collar.

He doesn’t voice the second part of the meaning, the  _goodbye_  that the wind tries so hard to steal free of his lips. He presses them closed instead, holding back the farewell and holding onto the blossoms, the scarlet petals that spill from his lips like he’s contracted some measure of Mikoto’s heat along with the illness that lays his heart bare for those who know the signs.

He’s still not ready to let Mikoto go, yet.


End file.
